


A Thousand Words

by Jaded



Category: Parks and Recreation
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-31
Updated: 2011-10-31
Packaged: 2017-10-25 03:12:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/271098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jaded/pseuds/Jaded
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-“Meet and Greet”; Andy’s not done talking to Ben about his feelings. Naturally, he handles it Dwyer-style.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Thousand Words

Of course Andy doesn’t knock when he comes into the room. “Hey, Brother!” he says, flopping onto Ben’s bed. He’s comfortably in his blue tartan pajama pants and a tattered Incredible Hulk T-shirt.

Ben swivels slowly in his chair. “Andy,” he says, but then does a double take when he notices that the skin around Andy’s eyes have turned purple from the broken nose. He feels himself soften. He still feels really bad about this. “How are you doing, man?”

“Fantastic!” Andy says, bouncing on the mattress, and Ben knows his roommate well enough to realize that this isn’t the pain killers at work. It’s just all Andy being Andy.

“So, I think you should tell me what’s bothering you.”

Ben tilts his head and frowns. “I thought we did that already. Remember, I told you that you needed to respect me, and then I broke your nose? We went to the hospital. They reset your nose?”

Andy belly laughs. “Yeah, I totally remember that! Good times!”

“Okaaay…”

“But seriously, man. What’s up? It wasn’t just tonight. You’ve been acting sad and weird for weeks now. And before you were so happy! Like remember when I spilled that slushie all over the carpet and onto your pile of laundry and you were like, ‘Andy, you know they make lids for those cups, right?’ and I was like, ‘Yeah, but it’s so much easier to drink and get a brain freeze this way,’ and you were like, ‘Fine, I’ll just take this to the dry cleaners, but I gotta get going somewhere now’ and you totally weren’t even that mad.”

“Yeah, I was actually kind of mad about that,” Ben says, remembering that he pretty much had to replace all of those shirts, except for the one orange and green plaid that Leslie really loved. The memory makes his stomach tie up in a knot, and he looks away so Andy doesn’t see the way his face falls.

“I think I know what you need,” Andy says, pursing his lips together and nodding to himself.

“Please don’t say Xbox sandwich.”

“Dude, that would be totally awesome if it were real! But seriously,” and Andy does look serious for a moment. “I think you need to get laid. I get laid all the time and I’m always in a good mood. It’s like, the perfect cure!”

“Yeah, well that’s not going to happen.” And it’s not, because it’s not like Tom hasn’t been throwing him toward all the Entertainment 720 girls, and it’s not like he hasn’t been given a suggestive look or two by the barista at Starbucks. It’s not even about getting laid. It’s about who he’d want to get laid with. Or really, just who he wants to be with, generally. But that isn’t happening, possibly ever again. These days, it doesn’t even seem like Leslie wants to be in the same room with him. They’ve barely talked, and it kills something inside of him every single day.

Andy stands up and strides over to Ben. Ben cowers just as Andy’s arms wrap around his arms and torso.

“Seriously, man, I don’t want to wrestle right now!”

Andy squeezes harder. “This is a hug, man!” His eyes shut with the pressure of hugging. Ben begins to gasp.

“I. Can’t. Breathe. Andy.”

Suddenly Andy releases him and Ben slumps into the chair, gobbling up air. “Good lord,” he wheezes.

Andy’s not paying any attention though. His eyes are trained on Ben’s cork board. Andy reaches out and Ben follows the movement of his hand until he sees Andy’s finger resting on the picture tacked there. It’s the only picture in the room. There are no pictures of his family or his friends, save for this one. It’s a picture of him with Leslie at the Harvest Festival, as they watch over Li’l Sebastian. He’s had it pinned up there forever, and even after they broke up, he couldn’t take it down. It seemed wrong to file it away as though that was a chapter that had passed in his life, and he wasn’t ever allowed to revisit it again.

“Hey, cool picture. Where’d you get this?”

“Uh, Leslie gave it to me,” he mumbles. “Some city photographer was going around that day and snapped this candid, and Leslie had a bunch of copies and she gave it to me, as a reminder of all our hard work.” He’d kept it by his bedside until the day he kissed her, and then he got to see that smile in personal all the time, got to see that smile targeted at him.

“It’s so good to see Li’l Sebastian. Man, I miss that little horse.”

Ben holds his tongue, doesn’t correct him to say, “Pony.”

Andy whips his head toward Ben, his eyes widening. “You should date Leslie!”

“What?” the confusion overtakes his brain, and he has to backtrack to figure out where along the thought process Andy currently is.

“I thought you said you liked her and she liked you! What ever happened with that? Man, you guys would be perfect together!”

Ben suddenly feels sick. “Well, thanks, but that’s not going to happen. That’s over.” But saying it doesn’t make it so, and it still doesn’t feel over for him, but maybe that’s where he has to go. He has to get over Leslie Knope. It’s the hardest thing he’s ever had to do. It makes Ice Town seem like cake.

“Wait, over as in you guys were dating? Like, super secret? Because that’s super hot. I wish April and I could have done that!”

“Andy…”

“Seriously, Ben! Was Leslie your secret girlfriend? April and I did notice your room was empty a lot at night when we came in to steal your comforter for our blanket forts. Were you at Leslie’s? Because that would be awesome.”

He suddenly feels so tired, and his shoulders slump and he just wants to got to sleep after this horrible, long night, and really, what feels like a horrible, long, last few months.

“We broke up,” Ben admits. “It just wasn’t . . . sustainable. It was a mutual breakup, but you know it’s just not that easy. . .”

Andy comes in for another huge hug, and he almost lifts Ben out of his chair. “If you love her you have to fight for her,” Andy says, still not letting him go. “I had to fight for April, and look at us now!”

And Ben has looked. And as immature and crazy as they are, they’re happy, and genuinely in love. He envies that more than he’d ever admit aloud, but it’s what he wants for himself, what he wants for him and Leslie. But what Andy’s asking for is an impossible thing.

“Look, maybe in another life it would have worked out between us, but there are too many complications…”

“Do you love her?” Andy puts his hands on his hips and stands up straight so he towers over Ben, casting a long shadow against the wall.

“What?”

“Do you love Leslie?”

No one’s ever asked him that. He hasn’t even asked himself, afraid of what the answer means, but when Andy says it, when he addresses him point blank, Ben feels himself nodding despite himself. Because he does love her. That part is simple.

“Then you have to fight for her!” and Andy shoves Ben so that his chair bounces off the desk and his binders go spilling onto the floor.

Andy smiles, then lets out a big yawn. He points at Ben with both hands. “As someone awesome once said, ‘Love is a battlefield.’ And you must go into battle my friend, with swords drawn!”

“I don’t think that applies here, Andy.”

“You’ll find a way. And,” Andy pauses, then lifts his thumb and forefinger to his chin, “Bert Macklin will be here to help.”

“Okaaay.”

Andy yawns again and goes to lie down on Ben’s bed. “Seriously, man. If you need any helping wooing your lady. I’m like, an expert of sorts in romance. But I’m tired. Do you mind if lie down here for a second? God your bed is so comfortable. Our futon just doesn’t have the same cushioning…”

“I do actually,” but Andy curls up on his bed and coves his face with a pillow. “Andy, you have your own room. Where am I supposed to sleep?” But Andy’s already snoring away.

Ben turns back and stares at his computer full of Excel spreadsheets. He knows numbers and figures. He knows how to make sense out of that. But love? Relationships? He’s never been particularly good at that. He’s never had a good reason until now.

When they broke up, he accepted it because there were rules, there were ethics. It was the pragmatic thing to do. But Ben's a smart guy, and he knows that about himself. There had to be a way to figure this out, because maybe Andy is right, even if it is the pain killers doing most of the talking. Ben goes back to his cork board and unpins the picture.

He loves her smile in this picture, the way she looks aglow. And he wants to see that again, but in person.

There's a saying, that a picture is worth a thousand words, but Ben knows something that’s truer than that: that Leslie Knope is at least worth a million, and he wants all those words, and he wants to say the to her.

He’s learned something tonight: if he can fight for himself, he can fight for her too.

 

[the end]


End file.
